Appeal No. 2005-1431
Application 09/442,070
Assoc., Inc. v. Zebco Corp., 175 F.3d 985, 993, 50 USPQ2d 1607, 1613 (Fed. Cir. 1999),
explains that Gentry Gallery concerns "the situation where the patent's disclosure makes crystal
clear that a particular (i.e., narrow) understanding of a claim term is an 'essential element of [the
inventor's] invention.' [134 F.3d at 1479,] 45 USPQ2d at 1503." No such clear language appears
in appellants' patent. The examiner has therefore failed to satisfy his burden of demonstrating a
lack of written description support for the "computer environment" limitation in claim 50,
whether or not the Chapter 9 material is considered to be new matter.
4. A "browser application"
Claim 40 recites a "browser application" that (a) "parses a first distributed hypermedia
document to identify text formats included in said distributed hypermedia document"; and
(b) "respond[s] to predetermined text formats to initiate processing specified by said text
formats." Claim 50 includes similar language but omits the network term "distributed."
Appellants, without an apparent challenge by the examiner, read the term "hypermedia
document" from claim 50 onto their compound document.40
The Doyle patent gives several examples of "browser" programs (col. 3, lines 15) without
offering a definition of a "browser" program or application. Appellants argue that "[i]n 1994 a
'browser' was simply anything functioning to browse through files or databases, and the
applications described in the specification [e.g., Word] certainly do that." Brief at 28. In
support, appellants note that the 1994 edition of the Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary fails to
40 We disagree with this position for the reasons given below in the new ground of
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